Music’s Demand Problem

I start­ed read­ing Michae­lan­ge­lo Matos’s Slow Lis­ten­ing Move­ment blog. I’ve seen vari­a­tions of the argu­ment for slow­ing down, like the slow food move­ment, as a means of chang­ing con­sump­tion habits, which in turn con­tribute to a dif­fer­ent way of liv­ing one’s life. It’s an inter­est­ing idea, but I think the notion of “slow lis­ten­ing” should some­how address the music indus­try’s instis­tence on treat­ing a prob­lem with demand as if it were a sup­ply-side problem.

You could argue that this has always been the issue with music. When­ev­er I think about the prob­lems fac­ing the music indus­try, I think about the music con­sump­tion habits of the peo­ple in my life. My par­ents were radio peo­ple. We nev­er had much record­ed music in the house, save for a few Christ­mas cas­settes that got played on a very sim­ply tape deck around the hol­i­days. I think this is true for count­less peo­ple, and always has been. It’s the con­sump­tion fac­tor that fuels ideas like rock­ism. Peo­ple want to know if the music they’re buy­ing will stand the test of time because they can’t see them­selves buy­ing much down the road.

How did the music busi­ness respond to this? By flood­ing the mar­ket with tons of new prod­uct! With reis­sues, every­thing old became new! It was a utopi­an mar­ket­place! Let 1,000 flow­ers bloom!

And bloom they did, until they wilt­ed into the tox­ic mess we have today. What seemed so great at the time sowed the seeds of our present dis­con­tent. The glut of new music, includ­ing reis­sues of every­thing under the sun, seemed like a gift to us crit­ics who yearned to hear long out-of-print albums and all kinds of bizarre record­ings from around the world. Scarci­ty had been abolished!

Then some­thing changed. It was over­whelm­ing, even to crit­ics who longed to hear rare and for­got­ten gems. There was no way to keep up! Yet the steady flow of new releas­es did­n’t stop, even as the indus­try plunged deep­er into the abyss. The solu­tion, it seemed, to a decline in music sales was to flood the mar­ket with even more of them. If you ever need­ed a refu­ta­tion of ratio­nal choice the­o­ry, look no fur­ther than any­one work­ing for a label in the post-Nap­ster music business.

Sure, scarci­ty was gone, but so was incen­tive to buy.  I like to think that once peo­ple dis­cov­ered that they did­n’t have to spend their hard-earned (or eas­i­ly bor­rowed) mon­ey on music, they stopped, nev­er to return again. That mon­ey was prob­a­bly bet­ter spent on gro­ceries or what­ev­er oth­er neces­si­ties peo­ple desired, includ­ing the inter­net con­nec­tion that made it all pos­si­ble. Worse, I think peo­ple in the music indus­try mis­tak­en­ly assume that the loss­es in music pur­chas­es are being made up some­where in the music con­sump­tion chain, whether it’s stream­ing or tick­ets or some­thing. I think it’s safe to say now that the whole pie is shrink­ing and the big play­ers just want to grab as many slices as they can before they head out the door.

Last­ly, it’s pret­ty clear now that even scarci­ty has­n’t been abol­ished. Dig­i­tal rights have re-intro­duced con­cepts that dig­i­tal deliv­ery was thought to have made obso­lete. It’s a fun­ny busi­ness, isn’t it? Every­thing old becomes new again!

(You’ll note I did­n’t address stream­ing music in this post. I think it’s a fool’s errand. New reports claim that stream­ing music is fill­ing the void, but how exact­ly do you fill a void with more void? Unless some­thing rad­i­cal­ly changes, even the most robust stream­ing music ser­vices are head­ed for the dust­bin and, yes, that includes Pan­do­ra and Spotify.)